1895 Morgan Silver Dollar

According to US Mint records, there were 12,000
regular business strikes made of the 1895 Morgan Silver Dollar. If this
is true, no one knows what happened to them, because to this day, not
one single example is known to exist.

Numismatic scholars have long sought conclusive evidence of their fate,
but the mystery remains. One line of thought is that the Mint retained
all of them until 1918, when 270 million silver dollars were melted
under the provisions of the Pittman Act, including the entire mintage
of the 1895 business strike dollars.

Some have theorized that the 12,000 number
indicated on the Mint report
were actually 1894 dollars delivered during 1895.

Whatever the truth might be, the fact is that the only opportunity for
a collector to acquire an 1895 Morgan Dollar lies with the Proof
population.

Of the 880 Proofs struck, an estimated 600-700 have
survived. For many thousands (or is it millions?) of Morgan Dollar
collectors, the 1895 stands as a major hurdle in completing a full set.

If the day should ever come when a group of 1895 business strikes are
found in a long ago forgotten vault, you can still bet the 1895 Morgan
Dollar proof edition will maintain its broad appeal.

1895 Morgan Silver Dollar (F-12 PF Condition)

The blue line above charts the percent
value increase since Year 2000 of the 1895 Morgan Silver Dollar in F-12
condition (all known 1895 Morgans are proofs, but many of them saw
circulation). The red line is the trend of the Rare Coin Values Index, which documents the market
activity of a representational group of 87 rare United States coins.
The Index uses Year 2000 as its baseline also. The objective of the
Index is to get a feel for the performance of the overall rare US coin
market. The 1895 Morgan Dollar is one of the 87 coins tracked in the
Index, and as you can see, it closely parallels the Index. The
individual performance of some of the coins in the Index is much higher
than the Index itself, some considerably lower. All Index data is
updated monthly.